New Year’s Resolutions: Dieting

As alluded to our blog posted earlier this week, getting fit ranks as the most common New Year’s resolution. Exercising is a crucial piece to the puzzle, and if you’d like more tips on how to work out efficiently while maintaining motivation, we recommend you check out that post here.

However, exercising isn’t the only thing that significantly affects your ability to get fit. A proper diet, balanced in calories with sources of vitamins, proteins, and crucial minerals we need to function on a daily basis can make or break your fitness resolution. And just like signing up for a gym or committing to an exercise routine, starting a new diet can be difficult to adjust to.

If you’re ready to change your lifestyle, Dr. Willard’s is here to help.

Pre-planning

Dieting has two main stages. There’s a planning phase followed by an action phase, and many people jump forward into this second stage without fully assessing their situation. The work that goes into setting up a diet has just as much of an effect, if not more, than its actual execution. So before you start counting calories, slashing portion sizes, or completely changing the type of food you eat, let’s begin with a simple observation.

What type of personality do you have?

We ask ourselves this question because we need to know how our attitude will affect our tendencies to eat food – this knowledge allows us to tailor the diet guidelines to our specific needs in the action phase later on. For example, if you’re an impulsive person, you may have a tendency to eat sporadically. Moving forward, you would need to remove certain temptations if any level of success is to be achieved. If you’re the kind of person who associates food with certain activities or times of the day, you may need to change these as well. Let’s say that traditionally, every Thursday morning, you have a coffee and a few donuts from a local place downtown. Simply breaking this association can be enough to remove those things from your diet long term.

Goals

With our personality in mind, next we need to set a few realistic, achievable goals. Sound familiar? The more specific the better, but sometimes we don’t have an ideal number in mind, maybe we’re not sure where we want to be in 6 months time and “losing weight” is good enough. Is it though? Research suggests it isn’t. Individuals who set specific goals and track their progress find themselves eating healthier, working out more, and being happier than those who do not. It’s much harder to find gratification in vague goals that don’t present themselves in an easily digestible manner – numbers are clear and obtainable. “What gets measured, gets managed.”

You can move from the planning phase to the action phase once you’ve made a commitment to improve yourself. Without 100% commitment, any little setback is likely to halt progress for long periods of time, or maybe indefinitely.

Action Phase

A successful weight loss program relies on running at a caloric deficit – as long as you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight.

A good balance of colorful fruits and vegetables, proteins, whole grains, beans, nuts, lean meats, and other non-processed foods is a good base to build on. If this doesn’t sound like your typical meal, that’s ok. The beauty of self-monitoring from the planning phase is that counting calories allows for some wiggle room. It’s ok to eat your favorite comfort foods in modest amounts, as long as you stay true to running at a deficit. Over time you’ll adjust to new foods and acquire a taste for things you thought you hated before anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

Here’s a list of the top 5 calorie counting websites/apps according to authoritynutrition.com. Most are free – start using them. From now on, you’ll be putting everything you eat and drink into one of these apps, and in turn they will keep track of your daily/weekly intake. Look up about how many calories it takes to fuel your body a day, on average, according to your height and activity levels. Let’s say this number is 2,000. Your goal is to eat 2,000 calories over the course of a day (keep in mind the meals should include balanced, healthy components from the list above,) and then burn more than 2,000 calories in the form of exercise. It’s a simple, straightforward method to losing weight over time, and it works.

We also can’t stress enough the importance of staying on top of vitamin and mineral intake, nutrients that are vital to our wellbeing. Many come from the foods we eat, but unfortunately the human body is super inefficient when it comes to absorbing and transporting these nutrients through the bloodstream. Even though you’ve switched your diet, you might not be getting the full effect. This is where Dr. Willard’s can help.

Dr. Willard’s Water serves as a catalyst to transportation when combined with ordinary drinking water. This means the nutrients we ingest are absorbed much more efficiently by the body, effectively giving us more from the same amount of food. This applies to vitamins and minerals as well. Dr. Willard’s Water helps to break down crude proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates, and fats which are more useable by the body. However, it doesn’t stop there. Dr. Willard’s also helps to detoxify our bodies serving as a free radical scavenger, reducing the effects of toxic compounds responsible for many degenerative diseases associated with old age and stressful lifestyles.

It’s easy to get carried away with dieting practices, and they can often times become overcomplicated and barring. Drinking Dr. Willard’s is easy. There aren’t any confusing procedures to follow, nothing in fine print to be hassled with. Customers of ours have been saying for over 40 years that Dr. Willard’s simply works, and we couldn’t agree more. If you’re interested in learning about the positive effects Dr. Willard’s can have on your body, dieting or not, we encourage you to check out the rest of our website. There you’ll be able to see various studies on the effectiveness of our product, informational graphics on makeup of the solution itself, and countless ways Dr. Willard’s has helped people accomplish their health and lifestyle goals all over the world.

It’s a new year, a new chance embrace a holistic lifestyle – drink Dr. Willard’s.